SHOCK’s Shawn Macomber gets an exclusive preview of Black Metal horror comic REALM OF THE DAMNED.
How does one begin a graphic novel that seeks to revive/re-imagine the classic monster pantheon by intertwining the tale of a fire-breathing Carpathian vampire marauding across the ruins of a neo-gothic Europe with the aesthetic, culture, and heroes of trve black metal?
Why, with a church burning, of course!
Taking my lead from albums like IN THE NIGHTSIDE ECLIPSE and DE MYSTERIIS DOM SATHANAS, the story had to be fast, rough and aggressive, and play with all this iconography like the corpse-paint, the burning churches, the Wagnerian violence and what have you, REALM OF THE DAMNED writer Alec Worleywhose work in the Judge Dredd and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universes is rightly celebratedtells SHOCK. But there are much deeper themes running through the music, too, and so the comics more than just a gore-fest. Black Metal has this obsession with spiritual rebellion, with paganism, the land and folk-culture. Its actually very romantic and sensual, in a classical sense.
The resulting inaugural volume, REALM OF THE DEAD: TENEBRIS DEOSfeaturing the brutally rendered artwork of 2000 A.D./JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE trailblazer Simon Pye Parr as well as guest appearances by seminal black metal aural hell-conjurers such as Behemoth, Mayhem, and Emperorwont be out until May via Werewolf Press, but SHOCK has an exclusive sneak peek of its opening frames, including the resurrection of the vampire Balaur by a group of black metal groupies.
Balaur is kinda the spirit of black metal, Worley says. Hes like a god, the ultimate metal chaos warrior. And the storyand stories to comewill develop in the wake of his mindless quest for bloodshed and destruction. Its like his (un)life is one big Black Metal gig!
SHOCK asked Worley if he might be willing to submit to a few questions in return for us submitting our readers to his carnage. Happily, he agreed.
SHOCK: Were there any particular horror graphic novel touchstones you had in mind when writing/sketching this thing out?
WORLEY: When we were still at the initial pitch stage me and Pye were thinking more along the lines of horror punk and psychobillybands like The Cramps and The Misfits; comics like Grant and Bisleys early LOBO minis. Balaur was much more of a scrawny, snotty Sid Vicious-type, and the story had more of a kitsch B-movie vibe. But [Werewolf Press founder] Steve [Beatty] was after something much more serious, something that cut a lot deeper. FROM HELL was a graphic novel that got mentioned a lot in terms of tone. I was thinking about the HELLBOY comics, toobut, really, in terms of what to avoid. Not because I dont like those books. I love them! I was, however, keen to either avoid or subvert the whole paranormal defense league thing. So I ended up asking what would happen if an agency like that no longer existed and the monsters were now free to rule the world.
I was also actually influenced a lot by the TV show PENNY DREADFUL, which I was watching at the time. Now, Ive got quite a few issues with that show, but the one thing I really likedactually lovedabout it was the fact that it recognized that Gothic horror is supposed to be fucking horrible! The genre has become so cute and cozy the stuff of the HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA movies. If you look at the genres history, though, going back to the eighteenth century when Matthew Lewis wrote THE MONKthis landmark horror story about the gradual damnation of a supposedly unbreakable holy manthat book’s publication was considered as blasphemous as burning down a church! The same goes for the plays of the Grand Guignol, and the Universal and Hammer horror movies. This stuff was terrifying! And the genre always needs to find ways of re-discovering that edge, and, for this story, black metal is a way of getting there
SHOCK: Can you tell me a bit about your history as a music fan?
WORLEY: Weirdly, music was never really part of my life growing up. When I was a teenager I was painting Citadel Miniatures and repeatedly watching obscure horror movies. Steve owned a record label [Candlelight Records ed.] as well as playing bass for post-punk band October File, so he was kind of our gateway into the music world. From him, I got educated in bands like Mayhem, early Burzum, Emperor and Behemoth, which I listened to on a loop while writing, before going on to discover bands for myself. But it turns out theres a huge crossover between that music and the kind of fantasy and horror stuff on which I grew up. These things share a lot of the same obsessions.
SHOCK: There definitely are! Why do you suppose black metal fits so well with a story like this?
WORLEY: Well, it was really a case of letting the music direct the story rather than the other way around. I didnt want to just write a generic Gothic horror story and let the music be the soundtrack. And, if Im honest, I recognized a lot in the story of Euronymous, Varg Vikernes, et al, which is just tragic and horrible. I was a hardcore geek-boy in the 80s and 90sthis was a time when you could get the living shit kicked out of you for liking this stuff. Being a geek was never something youd admit to. And all that resentment, those power-fantasies, and that feeling like you just wanna slit the world’s throat, it all helped give birth to black metal. And that adolescent male pathology was something I wanted to tap into, to explore what happens when someone crosses the line and acts out a collective power fantasy.
SHOCK: The story covers a lot of monsters and a lot of geographic ground. Does that make it more fun to write in an anything-goes sort of way?
WORLEY: We had a set number of monsters we wanted to include: a vampire king, a Frankensteins monster-type golem, a werewolf and a mummy. So we kind of re-translated these icons in the language of black metal. Kinda like, If late 80s Bathory were to write a song about a werewolf king how would the band portray him ? As for the setting, the script kind of developed this European exoticismfor me, a London-dwelling Britas the story tapped into not only the history of Norwegian black metal but also European history and folklore.
SHOCK: How far would you like to take REALM OF THE DAMNED?
WORLEY: Well, weve got a few more books planned, all set in the same world, but each will have a very different feel, and go deeper into the world. As for what I want readers to take away from book one, Id probably say the same as youd take away from any good Black Metal album: just the feeling of Fuuuuuuck! That kicked ass!
Click below for our EXCLUSIVE PDF preview of REALM OF THE DAMNED!
